Radical court decisions blamed on disintegrating society

Did the radical court decisions of the 1960s cause the decline in society’s morals? Or were the court decisions a reflection of societal plunge in standards?

“During the 1960s the drug and ‘gay’ counter culture of San Francisco flourished, and nude bathing at a park in Austin, Texas, began,” said William J. Murray, chairman of the Religious Freedom Coalition.

“New York City in the 1960s was far worse than portrayed in the movie, ‘The Cross and the Switchblade’; the city was a hell hole on the edge of bankruptcy,” he said. “Anti-war protests encouraged by money from the Soviet KGB filled the streets of cities, and a communist by the name of Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated President John F. Kennedy.”

It was on his behalf that his mother, famed atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair, filed a lawsuit claiming compulsory prayer and Bible reading in public schools is unconstitutional.

“Is this the idyllic ‘Leave it to Beaver’ 1960s you recall?” he continued.

“The 1963 case removing prayer from the schools did not bring any of this about; rather the case was a result of the culture of the 1960s. An activist Supreme Court led by a former Republican governor who was a radical leftist on moral issues and who saw himself as the leading edge of the sexual and cultural revolution of the 1960s,” he said.

Prayer in the schools 50 years ago, said Murray, “had little to do with morality and a lot to do with authority.”

He noted the speaker of the House of Representatives, the second most powerful man in America, has the words “In God We Trust” engraved over his chair in the House Chamber.

“This is more than the national motto; it was meant to be the real source of authority for our government,” he said. “If rights come from God they cannot be taken away, but if they come from government, a simple majority vote can void those rights,” he continued. “Fifty years ago prayer and Bible reading represented the authority of God over the school, the teachers and the students. Bowing of heads in the morning for prayer was much more about surrendering to the authority of God than about learning ‘morals.'”

He said that as his mother fought to remove prayer from the public schools, he was attending an all boys school in downtown Baltimore, Md.

“The school was a magnet school before the term even existed and was intended to prepare young men for colleges, majoring in science and engineering. There were 1,800 young men in the school and there was not a cop in the building, ever. The doors were unlocked and often the un-air-conditioned rooms had open windows. There were no metal detectors, and students went in and out the doors on the honor system,” he said. He told WND that it is time to stop pretending the 1960s were something they were not.

They had the “make love not war” drug culture of Timothy Leary and boastful homosexual elected officials in San Francisco, he said.

Along came the Murray v. Curlett case, which was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court on June 17, 1963, 50 years ago.

He pointed to two other cases against Bible reading in school and the landmark abortion case, Roe v. Wade.

“The logic in those cases continues today – the Living Constitution logic – this logic reduces our republic to the status of democracy, which is in fact mob rule,” he said.

Murray said he “remembered the 1960s that I was a part of.”

“My mother managed the Communist party bookstore in Baltimore, Md., and was the chairman of the pro-Castro, Fair Play for Cuba Committee,” he said.

“Far from being the poor persecuted atheist boy, I was the president of the United Nations Club at my high school, the gathering place for the far left. Radical unions associated with the International Workers of the World controlled most major ports in America. The Weather Underground was killing cops and robbing banks for the ‘revolution’ and Charles Manson led a cult that killed far more people than he was ever tried for. Meanwhile Harvard Professor Timothy Leary advocated LSD for everyone,” Murray wrote.

“The question of course is, ‘Why is it even worse today? Why do we have a militarized police force, cameras on every corner and social order out of control?’

“The honest answer is that the nation is now populated not with the children of the Greatest Generation, but the children of the 1960s counter-culture induced by drugs and ‘free’ sex,” he said.

“The cohesive family, the three generation family and the stability it represented has been obliterated, and not by the lack of three minutes of prayer in the schools, but by a systematic … attack by government that began long before the 1963 prayer case,” said Murray.